01732 759725 32 CONNECTIVITY How Comms365 can help MSPs grow through the provision of cellular and bonded connectivity market and, of them, we were the only one to have a physical core network.” A big opportunity Today, Comms365 offers a wider choice of connectivity options, but cellular still accounts for more than 70% of its business – and a big opportunity for channel partners, according to van Bunnens. “Cellular continues to be king in terms of revenue. Every single day there are new use cases for cellular and I think we’re at the start of a hockey stick growth curve. Everybody's talking about it, and there’s still an incredible array of use cases that haven’t been discovered yet. There's going to be plenty of room for people to get involved with this market.” Van Bunnens points out that cellular is a good option wherever it can be hard to install a fixed line or where speed of deployment is a requirement. He cites the examples of a solar farm that prefers to use cellular technology than dig up a field to lay a fixed line, as well as cellular’s ability to bolster a fixed line with additional bandwidth. “It’s brilliant for things like CCTV and remote monitoring and it’s great for failover and backup to fixed lines. However, we tend to say that if you use cellular just for backup, you're using only half the service because cellular can be used in conjunction with the fixed line or the primary connectivity to provide an active/ active connection, using both technologies at the same time. That's what we refer to as basic bonding.” Bonded connectivity Comms365 started working with bonding technologies to boost throughput more than 10 years ago. “Back in the day, we used cellular for pop-ups, for ticket machines, for vending machines and for office communications as a 3G connection may actually have provided a better connection than an old ADSL line. In about 2012/2013, we started experimenting with bonded services, because the throughput and the bandwidth on ADSL and 3G was very low. One of the ways we thought we could enhance that was by bonding multiple connections together to bolster that throughput. We worked with a manufacturer of early bonded equipment and built quite a healthy business from that. Now, we have our own bonded technology and are probably one of the biggest service providers of bonded technology in the UK – it provides primary connectivity, not only backup; it is extremely robust; QoS and other advanced features are available; and it's become mainstream.” Comms365 does bonded cellular (4G and 5G), FTTC/FTTP, SoGEA and Ethernet. It recently launched a new technology, Continuum, that will bond up to four 1 Gig fixed lines from multiple carriers to provide added resilience and throughout of up to 4 Gigabits per second. “The beauty of that is that it comes onto our network,” explains van Bunnens. “We're in control of the routing. We're in control of the IP addressing. We can do QoS. We can pass traffic in different directions. We can build that bonded service into a full-blown SD WAN environment, enabling us to get multiple sites up and running very quickly. Gone are the days when you have to wait months and months for a carrier to deliver connectivity. We can even take non Comms365 connectivity and bring it into our environment very rapidly.” In this context, van Bunnens points out that Comms365’s record results last year were powered, in part, by channel partner Daisy’s deployment of its SD-One bonding and 4G failover solution in 1,650 Greene King pubs. MSP appeal All this, he suggests, presents interesting opportunities for IT MSPs that already make up a big part of Comms365’s partner network. “About a year ago, we did a deep dive into our partner base to try and understand what areas they worked in. Were they VARs? Were they UC resellers? Were they traditional voice resellers? Were they MSPs? We found that a lot of our biggest partners sit within that IT MSP space. MSPs are becoming more involved in WAN services and connectivity services Following the most successful 12 months in its 15-year history, internet connectivity provider Comms365 is looking to recruit more channel partners to leverage the additional capacity and capabilities it has built into the latest iteration of its core network (see panel). Founded in 2008 by Managing Director Mike van Bunnens and Technical Director Shaun Nicholls, Comms365 provides channel partners with resilient and always-on internet connectivity solutions and services utilising 4G and 5G, bonded internet, SD-WAN, fixed line and IoT technologies. The company started out as a wireless ISP, building a small core network and buying wholesale connectivity from Vodafone and a broadband provider, before getting its big break when it won a contract to provide mobile data connectivity to support the rollout of Tesco Mobile pop-up stores. “That really gave us credibility but also validation that we were doing the right thing,” explains van Bunnens. “At the time Wireless Logic, Mobius and Stream were the only other players of any note in this Growth bonds Mike van Bunnens
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